I wrote yesterday about how the chance that our local utility is named after the City of Portland and not after some larger political or geographic unit contributed, in my view, to our local politicians focusing on how the City of Portland could buy it, rather than on who the logical public buyer should be. That got me to thinking about the effect that names, and nicknames too, have on our perceptions. Today's farfetched example comes from the Dublin of 1882, when on May 6 a group of conspirators (including one Dublin city councillor) who were part of a group known as the "Invincibles" murdered Thomas Burke, the British undersecretary for Ireland, killing with him the secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish. The crimes became known as the Phoenix Park murders and were a cause celebre for many years.
The city councillor, James Carey, turned state's evidence and testified against the others. Most of them were hanged. Mr. Carey left the country after testifying but was discovered on ship by one of the Invincibles named O'Donnell, who murdered him after the ship landed in South Africa.
In time, as with most similar crimes, the story was forgotten, and few people today (even in Dublin, I think) could name even one of the conspirators -- except for professors of 20th-century English literature and singers of Irish folk songs.
Why? The Invincible who drove the getaway carriage, James Fitzharris (born in 1832), was better known around Dublin as "Skin-the-goat" because of an incident in which he killed his goat to sell its skin. He was the only defendant to have such a colorful nickname. Thirty-five years later, James Joyce put "Skin-the-goat" into Chapter 16 of Ulysses, choosing him no doubt in part because of his remarkable nickname.
But Mr. Fitzharris also survives in the world of song. An Irish drinking song, "Monto," includes the stanza: "When Carey told on Skin-the-goat / O'Donnell met him on the boat / He wished he'd never been afloat, the dirty skite. / It wasn't very sensible / To tell on the Invincibles / They stood up for their principles day and night." (The other stanzas of "Monto" contain similar coded references to political events of the 19th century, like the political comments hidden in the Mother Goose verses.)
The Invincibles' victims were prominent officials. Several of the Invincibles themselves, not including Mr. Fitzharris, were well-known in Dublin. But it's the obscure James Fitzharris whose name has survived, all because one day he killed his goat and earned a unique nickname. I kid you not.